A Japanese Air Force F-35 crashed on Tuesday. It disappeared off the radar off the Japanese coast. The aircraft has been searched for hours. It was eventually traced, an Air Force spokesman said. There is no trace of the pilot yet.

The jet fighter of aircraft manufacturer Lockheed Martin was less than a year old and was delivered to the Japanese last May. What went wrong is still unclear.

Recently, a United States armed forces F-35, as brand new, and costing 89 million dollars, crashed.

The Japanese F-35, costing $100 million, had been in the air for only 28 minutes, Reuters reports.

At the end of this year, the Dutch armed forces will officially start using this type of warplane. The F-35, known here as JSF, flew 135 kilometers east of Air Force Base Misawa when air traffic control lost contact. At the same time it also disappeared from the radar.

More fighter jets

The plane was found after an hour-long search. “We recovered the wreckage and determined it was from the F-35”, a Japanese Air Force spokesman told Reuters news agency.

The Pentagon announced Monday the single largest arms purchase in its history, agreeing to buy nearly 500 F-35 fighter aircraft at a total cost of $34 billion. This purchase is only a down payment on the Pentagon’s acquisition of the notoriously wasteful and failure-prone aircraft, whose design is based on two overarching priorities: fighting a war with a “great power” such as Russia and China and lining the pockets of Lockheed Martin and the horde of former congressmen and retired generals on its payroll: here.